It is well known that individuals tend to forget about such items as tasks, locations, names, and events with regularity. One approach to reminding people about items that that they might forget is to employ automated reminding systems that alert users. For example, online calendaring systems often provide services for alerting people about pending appointments. In the real world, there are many categories of events that may be forgotten, beyond appointments and it can be a challenge to inform a system about events that may be forgotten. Further, it can be a challenge to understand the times, and, more generally, the contexts, when information that might likely be forgotten might be relevant. In addition, sending people reminders about items that might be forgotten can be costly. People can be overwhelmed with a multitude of notifications and messages emitted from portable and desktop computing systems and applications that have as their ostensible impetus and purported objective the making of daily life easier and more tolerable. Nonetheless, this unceasing flurry of notification has left most individuals overworked and frustrated with the cognitive load of interruptions and notifications. Recent studies have revealed that an average user or individual can receive several notifications every hour from a multitude of sources (e.g., e-mail, personal information managers, etc.). Furthermore, it has also been revealed that each notification can require significant amounts of time to recover once the individual has addressed and/or dispatched the issue associated with a notification (e.g., to regain one's thoughts and re-focus on the task at hand). Clearly, where an individual receives scores of notifications and/or reminders every hour and if, as has been posited, it can take significant amounts of time to realign or reorient one's cognition back to an interrupted task after a disruption, there can be insufficient hours in a day in which to complete one's own assignments and tasks.
The subject matter as claimed therefore is directed toward the automated assistance with the recall of information that may be forgotten, while addressing the challenges of predicting forgetting, identifying relevance of information, and the cost of interruption associated with reminders, even when the reminders are overall valuable.